"The results reinforce the notion about the amount of growth and opportunities that we have in the region," said Peter Gill, vice president, Banking & Financial Markets, ASEAN, IBM.
CXOs, including CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, CROs and CMOs from some 20 financial institutions based across Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, responded to the study. Further information on the findings from the study will be published by end of April 2013.
Data from the report indicate that Big Data is moving away from being an IT initiative and to the business side of the banks. A few leading banks were observed appointing individuals or groups to understand and map Big Data initiatives internally. "The ones that are leading have a defined roadmap on where they would like to get to and the progress on getting there," said Gill.
“We liked him very much,” he said. “His style was a serious one, but at the same time very friendly and very smart.”
Philippe Bastien, who sells Catholic religious objects at a store called Liturgica on Innes Road — everything from books to Virgin Mary lawn ornaments — said people are already asking for pictures of the new Pope.
They are already in process and should be ready in a few weeks, he said, and he will sell a couple of hundred, plus thousands of smaller card-sized ones.
“A month or two down the road they’ll offer some laminated models, something that’s framed already, larger pictures,” he said. “Also any books he may have written, they’re going to redo them: book by Pope Francis.”
But what does the election of Pope Francis mean to the average Ottawa Catholic?
Catherine Clifford, a professor of theology at Ottawa’s Saint Paul University, said that while many Catholics in Ottawa are progressive in their thinking, their reaction to the conservative new Pope will be interesting — and more complicated than a straight liberal-conservative tension.
Gill observed that banks have been not only been delving into unstructured data sources like emails and call centre logs, but also third party platforms like Facebook and Linkedin. But the main challenge is to be able to make sense of all the information, he said. "How do you value the opinions of, for instance, a blog? How do you assess the accuracy and impact of the data obtained?" said Gill.
While no banks have emerged as clear leaders, organisations with well-articulated Big Data roadmaps will break away from the pack in the space of two to three years, said Gill.
Legacy system refreshes remain high on the CXOs' spending agenda. Almost all the interviewed banks indicated that they still have pockets of legacy systems within their infrastructure. These ageing cobbled-together platforms are found in branch and channel solutions, ATM, credit card and payment systems.
But besides updating the old, system refreshes initiatives are also driven by modern front-end processes. "As you add mobile platforms and apps, you need to have systems within the bank that can support them," said Gill.
Meanwhile, mobility is going to be the main theme for payment models this year, according to the report. Survey respondents have indicated that they will be focused on customers' mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as mediums for payments.
The IDC report observed that several banks have already introduced innovative projects based on mobility. One bank in Singapore has been utilising near field communications (NFC) smart posters that allow vouchers to be stored digitally on cards and SMS-based payment systems for bills. A Thailand-based bank has a program that allows anyone with a smart device to become a merchant for credit cards by using a dongle.
She said that while the new Pope may be a traditionalist in some ways, his simplicity of lifestyle and his social justice agenda will speak to many people in a city like Ottawa.
“I think everyone can identify with that and especially people on the left, if you want,” she said — although she added that Ottawa Catholics are a diverse group that’s not uniformly left-leaning.
There will still be issues, she said, like the ordination of women, that won’t be as high on the new Pope’s agenda as some might like.
Clifford said, however, that this is something North American Catholics will have to learn to deal with.
“It’s hard for us as North Americans or Westerners to see that the majority of Catholics don’t live here and they don’t live in Europe,” she said. “Sixty-six per cent live south of the equator. This is going to challenge our notions of the worldwide Catholic community, in a good way.”
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